A Simple Story by Shmuel Yosef Agnon
Published 1935 · 260 pages · 90,095 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is A Simple Story to read?
A Simple Story scores 47 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 42 out of 100
- Agnon's Hebrew in translation with period vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 45 out of 100
- Agnon's measured, traditional storytelling style.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Questions of love, duty, and Jewish tradition.
- Information density: 45 out of 100
- Dense with Galician Jewish cultural detail.
- Narrative indirection: 50 out of 100
- Agnon implies much through what characters don't say.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Marriage, madness, tradition carry thematic weight.
- Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
- Agnon's stance toward tradition is complex and ironic.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Story ends but irony undercuts simple resolution.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Essentially chronological narrative.
How A Simple Story is regarded
A Simple Story holds a literary regard score of 67 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.